Site Mobile Navigation

In American Cities, No Mirror Image of Muslims of Leeds

After the four suicide bombers in London were identified last week, news accounts focused on life in the old mill town of Leeds, where they grew up: the immigrant enclaves, the high unemployment, the rising anger and alienation of Muslim residents. Some Britons grasping for an explanation pointed at those conditions, however tentative their link to homegrown terrorism.

That rough sketch of Leeds had a familiar ring for many residents of the Northeastern United States, where old mill towns in New Jersey and upstate New York have also drawn many immigrants to faded neighborhoods teetering between blight and renewal.

Three of the suspects were raised in immigrant families from Pakistan and one from Jamaica. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are now home to at least 20 percent of the nation's 219,000 Pakistani immigrants, and more than half of the 513,000 immigrants from Jamaica.

But the differences between the suspects' hometown and the depressed cities around New York are actually stronger than the similarities. Social conditions among British immigrants, for example, appear to be considerably worse than they are in the United States.

The 747,000 Pakistanis in Britain, counted among its nonwhite residents, are three times more likely to be out of work than white Britons, according to one of several bleak statistics showcased in the 2001 British census. Forty percent of Pakistani women and 28 percent of Pakistani men are listed as having no job qualifications, and school failure among Caribbean blacks is triple the rate for white Britons, who constitute 92 percent of the population.

In America, where few surveys even break out ethnic origins, a much rosier picture emerges from available figures. Pakistani household incomes in New York are close to the $43,393 median and exceed it in New Jersey -- $56,566 compared with $55,145, according to 1999 figures, the most recent available. Jamaicans fare a little less well statewide, but have robust rates of household income and educational success in New York City, where they are concentrated. They have a clear edge: English proficiency in a place where one in four residents cannot speak it well, and where nearly half of the work force is foreign-born.

While South Asian immigrants to Britain began arriving soon after World War II, they were part of a stream of temporary workers to a small, culturally homogenous country where they remained outsiders. In the United States, the pioneer immigrants from predominantly Muslim lands arrived mainly after 1980, many as university students, and like Caribbean blacks, entered a diverse country built on immigration.

But demographics fall short of explaining terrorism. As details emerged about the British suspects' relatively prosperous lives, experts and immigrant parents alike wondered how much collective benchmarks mean in predicting the extremism of a handful of angry people.

Compared with Britain, "We definitely have a different dynamic going on here in the United States," said Peter Skerry, a political scientist at Boston College. "I don't know that that necessarily means we're out of the woods -- it doesn't take very much for a set of individuals to adopt attitudes that could lead to a terrorist act."

Others, like Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center of Immigration Studies, which favors more restriction on immigration, point out that this important demographic difference is temporary: Since most immigrants to the United States from Muslim countries arrived after 1990, few of the children born to them here have reached adulthood yet. He found that more than 85 percent of the 100,000 children born in America to Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are under 20.

In a Jersey City shop where fresh goat meat and comic videos in Urdu compete for shelf space, Zafar Zafar, a Pakistani father of three, echoed such concerns last week. Mr. Zafar, whose oldest child is 13, struggled in imperfect English to convey his horror at the case of Shahzad Tanweer, 22, the suspect described as a pious but fun-loving youth whose father owned a fish-and-chips shop in Leeds.

"It's like a bad dream," Mr. Zafar said. "Someone, crazy guys, make brainwashing." He added, "We need protection. Like, every week, two times a week, all youngsters in community should go together, and someone is teaching them, 'This should no happen again."'

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

So far, there is little research and less agreement on how well Muslim newcomers are assimilating as Americans, say scholars like Mr. Skerry, who is associated with the Brookings Institute, and Robert S. Leiken, the director of Immigration and National Security at the Nixon Center.

"The whole issue of assimilation and integration in relation to terrorism is extremely complicated," Mr. Leiken cautioned, noting that more terrorists have turned out to be social winners from an educated middle class, rather than impoverished losers. "Integration may be going well, but there are people who assimilate as critics, as revolutionaries."

There is general agreement, he said, that since 9/11, larger numbers of young Muslims in the United States feel victimized, resentful and alienated, but that is where the consensus ends. "Some people hold that Muslims are integrating in just the same ways that other American immigrants have integrated," he said. "Others see a process of radical Islamicization."

Once children born to Pakistani, Egyptian or Iraqi immigrants might simply have found a dual identity in a hyphenated bridge to their parents' national origins. But Mr. Skerry, who has been interviewing such immigrants across the country, said events since 9/11 -- special registration programs, the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq -- almost require even secular families in this second generation to construct an American identity as Muslims.

Partha Banerjee, director of the New Jersey Immigration Policy Network, an immigrant advocacy organization, warned of a growing sense of political exclusion among such immigrants, who are facing an anti-immigrant backlash with virtually no elected officials from their own ethnic group.

Income statistics in New Jersey hide sharp disparities, he noted, like the chasm between suburban sahibs in places like Somerset, the nation's most affluent county, and poor Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in crowded Jersey City households.

"Violence and terrorism really have no place in a civilized society and I'm not condoning any type of excuse for it," Mr. Banerjee stressed. "But the fact remains that if you just exploit and abuse people without giving them their rights, you run the risk of creating a danger in your own society."

In Jersey City, where more than a third of residents are foreign-born, there are no hard-edge ethnic enclaves. A policeman pointed out the second-floor mosque where Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind sheik, used to preach and plot to blow up New York landmarks; it sits over a Chinese takeout restaurant now.

A short walk from Mr. Zafar's shop on Newark Avenue on a recent Friday morning, Haitian families in starched finery entered an old movie palace for a convention of Jehovah's Witnesses. At the beauty parlor nearby, everyone was speaking Spanish. And down the block, Indian, Pakistani and Chinese immigrants of different faiths flocked to Patel's Cash and Carry for sacks of rice advertised in an all-American way: "Buy two, get one free."

Fauazia Modak, 26, a Muslim immigrant from Bombay, paused in her shopping to protest what she said were harsh government immigration policies that seemed to blame all Muslims for the crimes of a few. Then she smiled at her son Mizan, just under 2.

"I don't think the children over here would be brainwashed," she said, leaning over his stroller. "I want him to be religious, but I want him to respect all religions. Not just his religion, not just his country."